I just finished Cryptic by Jack McDevitt, a collection of his short fiction.

I'm a fan of McDevitt's novels, but a lot of the short stories in this collection didn't wow me. Most of them were just OK. Of the 30+ stories, there were probably five that I really liked.

Reading a bunch of different pieces by one author in a row does give you a good sense of their writing. Reading through this collection gives a strong picture of the sense of melancholy that runs through a lot of McDevitt's work.

Just saw The Invention of Lying, the new Ricky Gervais movie. It has some funny moments but it wasn't as good as I hoped.

They handle the premise in a weird way. Instead of just not being able to lie, the people in the movie must tell the whole and literal truth all the time, i.e. they can't stay silent and they can't be mistaken. It also postulates that everyone in the real world is very negative and mean, but just keeps quiet about it. This changes the whole tenor of the movie, and makes all the characters come off as more mean than truthful. And after Ricky starts to lie, it makes them all appear stupid.

The beginning of the movie, mainly scene after scene of people criticizing Ricky, are a real downer. It picks up somewhat as Ricky learns to lie, but never fully recovers. And the main plot centers around his pursuit of Jennifer Garner while never making it clear why he is interested in her, other than her looks. He's portrayed as deeper then that, but she never offers anything and comes off as shallow throughout.

I just finished The City & The City by China Mieville.

(Spoiler alert)

Mieville's latest novel is, at heart, a hardboiled detective/police procedural style mystery. The setting is what sets it apart, at puts it with one foot in the SF field. The protagonist works in a strange city in the Balkans that has become mentally bifurcated. Some people live in Beszel and some live in Ul Qoma, though they are physically co-located. Both sets of citizens are trained from birth to ignore the other city and its populace unless they cross between them through a border crossing. Inadvertent, and intentional, illegal crossings are investigated by a feared and mysterious group known as Breach. When a foreign student is killed in one city and dumped in the other, the resulting investigation threatens to undermine the whole setup.

The weird setup gives it the feel of a SF novel, without actually involving any fantasy or SF elements. And overall, the mystery elements work. There are the standard sinister businessmen, threatening thugs and people who want to shut down the investigation, but they all feel fresh enough in the telling to work. The climax of the novel is a little of a let down, but this kind of mystery is more about the process then it is about the solution. The most similar mysteries are probably Martin Cruz Smith's Renko novels.

Overall it's nice to read a Mieville novel that is not set in the same world as most of his fantasy novels. This one is not as disturbing to read as some of his others, more like a middle ground between the feel of Perdido Street Station and his YA novel Un Lun Dun.

I just finished The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

The Age of Wonder covers what Holmes calls the second scientific revolution in Britain. Specifically he covers the careers of Joseph Banks, William Herschel, Humphrey Davies as well as the craze for ballooning and the early careers of Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage and John Herschel.

One of the main points of the book seems to be to put this new crop of scientists (a term that was only created towards the end of this period) in context and show how art and science were more closely aligned. Most of the scientists above wrote poetry of one form or another and were friends with some of the great Romantic poets like Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, who also wrote poetry that used scientific themes and inspiration.

The topic is an interesting one, but the books main strength is the writing. The author has a strong, clear style that brings out the various personalities and keeps the narrative interesting and informative without getting bogged down in details.

I just finished The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton, the second book in his Void Trilogy.

Not surprising here - it's not really a separate story as much as a direct continuation of the first book, which I wrote about here. So much so, that it was hard to start this book since it's been a while since I read the first one. Keeping track of the list of characters and their complex interactions wasn't easy even while reading that book - trying to do it jumping into this one was worse.

Also, like the first book, the story within a story, told as series of shared dreams, is more compelling than the main story. It takes some unexpected twists here, turning it's protagonist into even more of an uber-mensch, but still makes for a good fantasy story, although it is now tied into the main story in such a way that it wouldn't make sense on it's own.

I spent most of the weekend at Bluegrassin' In The Foothills, (commonly called the Plymouth festival).

The highlights of the show were Town Mountain, Audie Blaylock & Redline, and Bluegrass, Etc. Three very different acts, but all put on excellent stage shows.

I also got to see the Steep Canyon Rangers, a band I didn't expect to like from their radio songs and the work they do with Steve Martin, but they also put on an excellent live show.

One theme of this years show seemed to be speed. All the bands were playing very fast - faster than I've seen some of them play in the past. I don't know if this is a new trend, but a lot of them are starting to push the point where things still sound musical instead of like some kind of contest.

Good research, but sloppy thinking.

I just finished Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell.

The thesis of the book is that the fixation on low price has significant long term costs, mostly hidden. Overall, that thesis is mentioned many times but not fully developed or explored. Most of the book is historical discussions about the rise of discounters and other purveyors of low prices.

The research is mostly very well done. The sections on cheaper food, discount stores and behavioral economics are very interesting. But each chapter stretches at the end to include some meandering thoughts, seemingly attempting to tie into the overall thesis but usually with little success.

In general, the logic and arguments presented in the book are it's weakest points. The author does not seem capable of connecting the data to the thesis and continually makes weak, off-topic or totally invalid argument after argument. One egregious example is the following excerpt from the chapter on cheap food.

Left to their own devices, global food markets pretty much follow the same "race to the bottom" model followed by other unfettered markets. Subsidies and economies of scale make grain and everything it is made of -- including animals that eat it -- increasingly cheap.

The author doesn't seem to notice that the 2nd sentence actually undermines the first, since "subsidies" are not a part of an "unfettered" market. This kind of sloppy thinking dominates the argumentative sections of the book.

Yesterday I finished The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard.

Subtitled How Law is Suffocating America, it would be more accurate to say How Changes in Philosophy of Law is Suffocating America. Howard does a good job providing lots of examples how the law has become less useful, more restrictive and counter-productive. How goes through three areas where he sees this.

The first is the growth of statutory law over common law. Statutory law specifies not only the general principles or rules, but also lays out the specifics of exactly how the law is to be interpreted and implemented, sometimes in grotesque detail. This over-specification is intended to ensure the exact results intended by the lawmakers without any judgment or flexibility and produces laws that become ends in themselves.

Similarly, his second main topic details how process has overtaken progress. In particular, processes that are intended to ensure fairness and lack of bias instead create forums for endless discussion, since there is no alternative once someone asks to be heard.

His third main topic details the growth of what I will call active rights. Starting with the important civil rights laws of the 1960s, some of the same ideas were extended to cover the disabled, etc. moving from the removal of barriers for some to the active support of others. Howard does a nice job in this section of pointing out that real rights are actually defensive in nature - a shield against the law/government, while these new "rights" necessitate action by others in order to support others. As such, they are not actually rights but are instead demands.

An interesting book. I don't know if his proscriptions at the end of the book are the correct fixes, since they don't focus on the philosophical problems that led to the problems, but the problems themselves are nicely delineated. One quibble - the book could have used in line footnotes to better source it's data, rather than just using end notes.

A few minutes ago, I finished The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion by Loren D. Estleman.

I've previously read a lot of Estleman's Amos Walker mysteries, mainly when I was over-dosing on mystery novels in university. This is his first western that I have read, and I wasn't blown away. It's an OK read, a semi-comic take on the Old West, with lots of asides to the reader thrown in about it's semi-comic take.

The story is basic at heart. There is a son of wealth who decides to be a black sheep and gets into robbery, using a travelling band of actors as a cover. Along the way, they interact with a detective from Pinkerton's and a much more serious, and nastier, gang of outlaws. Mix in a few twists and turns, and you have an OK novel but not much more.

Yesterday we saw Julie and Julia, the latest Nora Ephron chick flick.

It was better than I expected. Ephron's work has consistently headed downhill since her biggest success, When Harry Met Sally, but J&J misses some of the flaws that have come to characterize her movies - overly cute dialogue, characters with no real edge to them and extreme sappiness. This is probably due to the fact that she was constrained by this being based on two real stories.

The first is Julia Child's discovery of cooking as her passion while living in France, the second is Julie Powell's story of how she got her life back on track by starting a blog and dedicating herself to cooking all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking within one year.

For me, the most interesting take away from the movie was the contrast between the self-confident, outwardly focused Julia Child's and the whiny, self absorbed, very modern Julie Powell.

The ending is probably the weakest, as it meanders to an end after Julie completes her cooking on time and Julia gets her book published. But overall, it's an enjoyable movie, particularly if you are vulnerable to food porn binges.

The latest book I've finished is Drood by Dan Simmons.

Drood fits nicely in a fairly new sub-genre, the "secret history. Pioneered by writers like Tim Powers, secret histories take actual people and actual historical events and put their own plot into the space created by odd coincidences or unexplained events. In Drood, this secret history is built around Charles Dickens and his one time protege Wilkie Collins.

It also uses another neat trick -- the unreliable narrator. The book is told in the form of a memoir written by Collins, who does not hide that he is taking huge amounts of opiates, usually in the form of laudanum, resulting in holes in his memory and the possibility of hallucinations. Even by the end of the book, it is never 100% clear what is real and what is fantasy.

While the book is well written overall, I do have a few quibbles. First, there is too much exposition. I did learn a lot that I didn't know about Dickens, Collins and the time they lived, but at times the exposition is too blatant and pulls away from the story. Second, the use of actual historical characters feels uncomfortable. In particular, the Collins character becomes less and less attractive as the story goes on. By the end of the story, he takes actions that would seem libelous if Colins was still alive. I don't know if there is any historical evidence for that kind of character assassination. This is true to some extent with all "secret history" type books, but it seems very egregious in this case.

Last night I attended the first public meeting of Make Oakland Better Now, a new organization focused on trying to improve Oakland, particularly in the three areas of public safety, infrastructure and city government accountability/transparency.

This is the first time I've attended a meeting for a political/grassroots organization like this, so it was pretty interesting. There was a decent sized crowd, probably around 100 people. Sadly, for such a diverse city, the meeting was not very diverse - almost exclusively older white people with a smattering of younger people.

The meeting organizers did a good job of laying out why they thought a new organization was needed and what they hoped to accomplish. I thought it was very good that they had realized that in order to be effective they need to focus on a small number of topics, and target things that can be measured and have impact.

I think they key will be in what comes next. The meeting broke up into three groups, each focusing on one of the improvement areas. I joined the group on transparency/accountability. There were some interesting points raised, but I think the person moderating this group needed to be more assertive in keeping the discussion on topic and coming up with concrete next steps. The "report out" from the other groups seemed more complete because of this. Our group ended up saying that we wanted to research the budget more and produce a version more people could understand, and do more with PR for the city. The first one isn't surprising since the moderator was a budget person and brought that up as the first thing, which influenced the direction of the whole discussion. The second is a nice, and important, idea, but is completely off topic for transparency/accountability of city government. Keeping it in totally undermines the focused approach of the organizers.

If I stay involved, I will try to influence this sub-group to re-focus on transparency and accountability, part of which includes understanding the budget.

This morning I finished Likely to Die by Linda Fairstein.

I don't know if this is a typical book in this series about a NY assistant district attorney, but it is a very weak book.

It seems the author, a NY assistant district attorny, is too focused on capturing the realities of her life in the novel. For example, there are too many characters thrown at the reader, with little purpose for many of them. Presumably these all map to real people the author deals with, but putting them in the novel without giving them significance in the story is pointless. There are also significant digressions where one character tells another about various sex crimes they are prosecuting or need help investigating. The author points out in a post-script that these details are all taken from real cases, but who cares? She seems to ignore whether or not it helps the story she is trying to tell.

In addition, the protagonist is almost inert for most of the novel. Since the plot never gets to the point of an actual trial, something surprising in and of itself for a book with a trial lawyer as the main character, the protagonist spends most of the book alternating following the police around as they investigate and relaxing while the police are off investigating things.

The book also fails on basic writing tasks. For example, there is an issue raised about a possible relationship the protagonists date and the murder, the protagonist is shown being very concerned about it and then it is never cleared up by the end of book.

Overall, one of the weakest books I've read in a long time. Too bad - I was hoping for something interesting because there are few legal thrillers told from the prosecution point of view.

Latest book finished - Elantris by Brandon Sanderson.

Elantris is Sanderson's first book, and it is an impressive debut with compelling characters and a setting that feels new.

The world he creates feels like it has a lot of back story, although this the rarest of fantasy beasts - a stand alone novel. There is enough to build on that I suspect there will be a sequel at some point, but the novel feels complete as it is.

It tells the story set ten years after the fall of the titular city, populated by members of the population that have been changed by a mysterious process to be powerful magical beings with the ability to manipulate the world around them. After the fall, these same creatures are turned into half dead creatures that have no abilities and can't heal and therefore deteriorate into madness over time. On top of that is the conflict between one expansive empire based on an aggressive religion and the surrounding kingdoms.

A lot of the plot elements feel new, rather than a standard re-tread of fantasy ideas. Sanderson weds that to a nice handling of characters, particularly his villains, who have more depth than is typical for the genre.

He has some other series novels now, and based on this book I will probably check them out at some point.

Last night I went to see The Honky Tonk Dreamers at McGrath's Pub in Alameda.

I mainly went to see Tony Marcus's guitar playing. He did play guitar on a few songs, but mainly played fiddle. I was also impressed by the rest of the band. Charlie Wallace was great on lap steel, pedal steel and guitar. Jerry Logan played excellent bass and sang a few songs, including one of my favourites, Across the Alley from the Alamo.

The surprise of the evening was Julay Brooks. I had seen her with some bluegrass bands, so I assumed she would just be the singer but she played a very nice swing rhythm guitar and took some good solos as well.

The band bills themselves as "Western Swing and Country Music". The set I saw was mostly Bob Wills songs, which isn't a bad thing, with a few country tunes thrown in. Overall, a very fun band to see live.

I just finished Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner.

This is by far the best non-fiction book I've read in a long time. It covers the history of recording music, from Edison's first cylinders to the modern Pro Tools/MP3 era.

It's not an exhaustive history, but gives snapshots of important events and people along the way. Not only does it cover these, but it also goes into detail on how the different and conflicting viewpoints of the time were reflected in the recording technology, from Edison wanting to stick to analog, mechanical recording to capture the "true" sound to the use of electronic recording and then digital and the quest to capture the sound of a space plus the sound and then to create new sounds out of nothing.

The one thing that could have improved this excellent book would be an accompanying CD or web site with sound samples based on what is mentioned in the text.

Well written, well researched, overall excellent.

Last night I finished In War Times by Kathleen Anne Goonan.

In War Times is almost an alternate history book, but in this case the protagonist thinks about alternate histories, wants to create alternate histories and, in the end, interacts with alternate histories. It follows a soldier who loses his brother at Pearl Harbor, gets involved in the design of directors for anti-aircraft guns, and travels through UK and Europe during the WW2 and lives through the birth of bebop. Early on, he is given the plans to a device that is never clearly described, but could change the world through some foggily described relationship between DNA and consciousness.

The creation of that device, and it's nebulous effects, run through the rest of the book. It is a very literary and intellectual science fiction book, filled mostly with discussion and ruminations on the nature of things. The unspecified nature of the device, and it's effects, does undercut a lot of that discussion though.

The movements, but not the specific character, of the protagonist are based on Goonan's father, who kept a memoir of his life in the war and just after.

There is one other annoying point in the book - a major plot point hinges on the Kennedy assassination and Goonan does seem to subscribe to the liberal trope that if Kennedy had survived, the result would have been Utopia. In truth, history has made it clear that Kennedy was just another scheming, deceptive, over-medicated, philandering politician.

This morning we went to see the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum.

When we got there, I wondered about how successful the exhibit was - there was no line outside and none I could see inside. But they do a good job of controlling the lines, and there was one down stairs, and once we got inside it was quite crowded.

The exhibit is very good. The signage is excellent, making the audio tour almost, but not quite, superfluous. And the quality of the exhibits and the amount of important artifacts was very good.

One warning - even though it is a "Tut" exhibit, don't expect room after room of Tut artifacts. There are basically two Tut specific rooms, the rest of the exhibit covers the period leading up to Tut and give a nice background. Of the two Tut rooms, the first is more interesting, with many objects from the tomb. The second is supposed to represent the burial chamber and is anti-climactic. There are only a few artifacts there, and none of the sarcophagi or masks. Those no longer leave Egypt.

Overall, an excellent exhibit and definitely worth the price of admission.

I just finished Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher.

This was a disappointment. It's a great topic for a book, and there is some interesting material here, but it is put together in a sloppy, un-focused format and the good stuff is mixed in with a lot of drivel, sometimes leading to conflicting ideas.

For example, parts of the book espouse the idea that being able to direct your focus towards the future, particularly the anticipation of events, can be beneficial, while other parts of the book take a strong stance in favour of the new age "be in the now" kind of thinking.

The sourcing is also all over the map. At times the author seems to have spoken to direct sources for scientific data, other times she repeats stories taken from a newspaper or TV show, with seemingly no effort made to distinguish between the different reliability levels of these sources.

Hopefully there will be another book on the same subject. There appears to be enough interesting research to support that.

More Heaven Than Hell

Last night we got to see Heaven and Hell, i.e the Dio version of Black Sabbath, at the Warfield in SF.

I pretty much lucked into finding out about this show. Guitar Center had a sale over the weekend and I had one guitar cable I've been whining about for years. So I decided to take advantage of the sale to replace it. On the way out, I always look at the flyers near the door and the one for Heaven and Hell caught my eye. Given that I haven't played my electric in over a year before this weekend, and I hadn't been to a Guitar Center in longer than that, it was very fortuitous.

The show was the next day, so I rushed home, expecting it to be sold out. Luckily for me, Heaven and Hell doesn't sell as well as Black Sabbath. This meant that not only were they playing a smaller venue, but that they still had good seats available.

The show itself was amazing, from the opening strains of E5150/Mob Rules to the ending of Neon Knights. For me the high points were Falling of the Edge of the World and Die Young, near the end of the set, but even the songs off their new album, The Devil You Know, and the slightly older songs from the under appreciated Dehumanizer were really good. They also had the obligatory solo sections for drum and guitar and some jamming and a sing along on Heaven and Hell.

It was the Mob Rules era lineup - Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice - and none of them have lost any of their chops. This is particularly amazing since Dio is 67, just 2 years younger than my mum. He was looking a little old running around, but he still has the pipes. Geezer was also looking, well, like a geezer but Tony Iommi is amazing - he doesn't look like he has changed in 20+ years.

Overall, I'm still amazed and thrilled that I got to see this band in a smaller venue. I don't do arena shows any more, so this might be the only chance I get to see them, and this is probably the closest I will every get to any of Black Sabbath. I will have to keep my eye on the Warfield to see who else comes through there.

The opening act was Coheed and Cambria. I'd heard their name somewhere before, but never heard any of their music. They did a good set, without a lot of stage banter. I assume this was because they were trying to fit as much as possible in their shorter set. Live rock shows aren't the best place to judge new music, due to the usually terrible sound mix and loudness, but they seemed to have some possibly interesting songs. The high point of their show for me was a nice cover of Iron Maiden's The Trooper. The only down side of their set was their lighting - they had a set of floor spotlights that were nicely set to point directly at the balcony, making it impossible to actually look at the band for a good portion of their set.